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The Full Story Behind the Canonical vs. GNOME Drama
supersloshy writes this followup to our Thursday discussion of friction between Canonical and GNOME:
"I've seen a lot of GNOME bashing for various reasons here on Slashdot as well as several other websites. The problem with all of this is that you never hear GNOME's side of the situation, making a lot of disrespectful comments about GNOME (or the others involved) rather baseless and illogical. Dave Neary has an extremely thorough blog post which details problems on all sides that make the issue much more complicated than 'GNOME is being idiotic by not accepting our technology.' The points covered in the blog post include, among others, how Freedesktop.org is broken as a standards body, that Mark Shuttleworth doesn't understand how GNOME works, that GNOME is not easy to understand, and that open discussions from the very beginning are important for specification development and adoption. Another blog post by 'Sankar' also covers similar points while defending GNOME."
Indeed. Android is killing both Gnome and KDE. It is more succesful by all measures, it is already the leading "Linux desktop" (as in: "Joe User uses it"). KDE and Gnome are no better than XFCE - hacky and not very successful projects for people that doesn't want the mainstream.
It is happening much faster than everyone expected, and I'm very happy about it - Android knows what the user want and they know how to provide it and how to compete with propietary platforms, they are not a bunch of mental masturbators who spend their time with flamewars and continuous rewrites of everything. I really hope Android extends some day their APIs to allow desktop apps and not just touch stuff, so that we can forget this old G/K stuff.